Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Unsurprisingly,
it’s not uncommon for people to balk at my love of literature. On the other
hand, as my generation emerges from the high-school-mandated-who-gives-a-shit-about-reading
phase, there are plenty of people who appreciate the pleasures associated with
a good book. I often muse about the psychological underpinnings behind why I
love reading so much. There is
something unutterably satisfying about being sucked into a tale and
experiencing a life that is not your own. That is one of the reasons why Alice in Wonderland has always been my
favorite “children’s story”.Its
narrative lends readers a transfixing feeling of fantasy that reaches a step
beyond pure entertainment. It is also one of the reasons why John Steinbeck is
such a respected author of storytelling gold. The guy knows how to capture and
retain your attention. No relation to the musician Beck, unfortunately. “Girl”
is a damn good song.

Many
of you have read Of Mice and Men--which
is a wonderful novella-- but to spice it up, I chose a work slightly off the
beaten path: East of Eden*. This book
is not for the faint of heart—my copy is a cool 691 pages. Still, his
spellbinding account of two families in twentieth century Salinas Valley,
California kept me genuinely interested throughout. Of course, I was most
intrigued with the cover...

What is this
absurdly-mustached man sitting uncomfortably in a field brooding over? Why is
this suspicious looking woman creepily staring at him from a short
distance? And if there is an umbrella
involved, it’s probably way too hot for that overdone get up. How pissed off is
the horse in the background that he has to lug around these irrational owners?
Obviously I have more questions than I have answers, but if a book looks like
this, best believe I’m gonna buy it.

I’m
always on the hunt for good, sturdy classics with eternal themes; they are
voices from the past that never lose relevancy. With a title like East of *Eden*, I assumed it would be
suffused with religious contemplations. Naturally, that is the case, but
religious-wary readers-- don’t be put off! It’s mostly concerned with Christian
allegory and how Old Testament men and women can be used to implicate
dispositions of good and evil and everything in between. Steinbeck crafts his
characters so meticulously that every relation, every action, and everything
they say points to something deeply ingrained within their personality. For
instance, within the Trask family, there are two generations of brothers:
Charles and Adam as one and Caleb and Aron as another (Adam’s sons). Additionally,
two motherly figures are involved named Cathy and Abra. Notice any resemblance
to Cain and Abel? The biblical story goes something like this: Cain and Abel
are Adam and Eve’s sons, which means they’ve inherited the consequences of
original sin. Both boys bring an offering to the Lord based on their particular
beginning-of-the-world career choices. God rebuffs Cain’s and smiles favorably
upon Abel’s. Understandably, Cain gets pissed at Abel and his anger takes the
form of murder. The Almighty confronts Cain, probably because there’s like four
people in the world at this point and he’s looking hella shady, and casts the
boy out of his sight and into the “east of Eden” (Steinbeck, 308). But first,
God marks Cain so that no one can kill him. Perhaps the Lord really just wanted
to embarrass Cain with a scar and make it difficult for him to find a lady
friend. Regardless, even though Cain is homicidal, God preserves him. His scar
face lived long enough to spawn while Abel rolled over in his grave wishing he
had given God a shittier gift.

That
ending isn’t easy to digest—it skews our sense of justice. Steinbeck taps into
that distortion and tries to work out how rejection, wrath, crime, revenge,
guilt, respect, and love intertwine with one’s moral compass. His intense focus
on man’s ethical temperament gives us insight as to how Steinbeck viewed
himself and how he felt about his work. He explained, “Humans are caught—in
their lives, in their thoughts, in their hunger and ambitions, in their avarice
and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and
evil. I think this is the only story we have… there is no other story. A man,
after he has brushed off the dust and his chips of his life, will have left
only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or
ill?” (Steinbeck, 475). No worries, John, you did well with this book.

The
general takeaway: man has a choice to triumph over wickedness and there is
glory associated with that victory. The majority of the sinfulness in East of Edenstems from dishonesty. Mendacity is tantamount to murder because when
a lie is uncovered, it shatters a beautiful Eden-esque world that was
originally intact. What someone once thought to be true is killed. Money,
acquired purely or impurely, can often be a driving force for lies. When that
dough is passed down, children can unknowingly become heir to a set of
falsehoods. Moreover, parents are like Gods to their offspring; so, if (when)
they’re caught in a lie, instability ensues. The kid not only questions why his
parent is capable of duplicity but also wonders if he himself is skilled at
that kind of deceit. Is it in his blood? Even all the way from Cain? Steinbeck’s
story is long because it needs to be. He’s showing readers a extended line of
inheritance of good AND evil qualities and how those fluctuate between
generations.

As you can see,
this novel is carefully constructed. Anyone who can weave a profound and
relatable thread through a story the way Steinbeck does deserves praise.
Similar to Dostoevsky, Steinbeck clearly strives to sift through the human
psyche when it’s faced with crime and depravity. Like his nineteenth century
Russian counterpart in The Brothers Karamazov,he is enmeshed in the
story as the narrator. He reveals that he is part of the generation that
follows East of Eden, the
great-grandson of Samuel Hamilton (akin to the biblical prophet), a major
character. With this knowledge, I extrapolate the story to deduce that some of the
inheritance-implications trickle down to him. I find the whole
inside-but-also-outside perspective intimate, as if Steinbeck were telling this
story about his ancestors to me in his living room. Furthermore, as a woman, I
enjoy how we are portrayed within the book. Eve was Adam’s undoing with the
apple thing after all, mwhaha. He introduces strong female characters that
prove clever in both their deception and righteousness. Overall, if you’re
looking for an older novel that has stood the test of time, look no further. I
give it 4 out of 5 camel humps and now that I have developed a fondness for
Steinbeck, I can’t wait to try The Pearl.

*Steinbeck, John. East of Eden. New
York: The Viking Press, 1952. Print.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

I’m
lounging on the patio of a Venice Beach boardwalk restaurant, reading, writing,
and sipping on a local Los Angeles pale ale. You’re at work right now, so I’m
having a better time than you. I’ll be in L.A. for two days before losing my
money/sanity/dignity in Las Vegas with three friends from college. Still, my MO
all weekend is naturally to lose friends and alienate people.

I would say
thank God for the handy how-to-- How to
Lose Friends and Alienate People* --if it weren’t for the fact that the memoir
was so meh. The author, Toby Young,
is better known for this book than for the half-hearted writing career the book
was based on. In it, he unveils the waspy drama associated with working for the
glossy, celeb-centered magazine Vanity
Fair. Originally from Britain, he becomes disillusioned by New York’s inevitable
indebtedness to the rich and famous. This wasn’t always the case—Toby had
aspirations of hard-hitting journalism beholden to no one, much less the wonton
vapidity of the upper echelon. Alas, the social Darwinism of the Big Apple overpowered
his longing for objective profundity. He once romanticized the role of a New York
Writer, a picturesque vision of exposing controversy left and right without
losing stride. After a few years stateside, his intellectually confident gait
whittled into a snail-paced slither.

Is this a surprise to anyone who
has ever opened a magazine nowadays? The memoir is 330 pages, half of which I
found myself saying no shit. The guy
worked for a powerful, wealthy, glamorous, and well-connected company and then
was shocked by their contemptuous, gratuitous actions. Granted, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People was
published in 2002 and is a little outdated. I might underappreciate his
references because they’re before my time. But it doesn’t take a rocket
scientist to see the relationship between money and influence.That being said, I did enjoy the tidbit about
celebrities’ wariness to eat in public for fear of being photographed. Toby
claims that on Oscar night, a hangry line of A-list stars pack the McDonald’s drive-thru
in their limousines (Young, 105). Roll the window up, sir, I need to pound a
Big-Mac alone in the dark while sporting an evening gown (which let’s get real,
sounds amazing).

In all, the book is 90% uninteresting
fluff, 10% comic relief. The memoir is predicated on the idea that Toby is
funny when unfortunately—for the most part—he’s not. You get a keen sense that
he’s fumbling through life, making one irrecoverable mistake after another.
That’s fine—I just ordered some fireball on tap and have suffered acute regret
ever since. But watching a guy not play his cards right career-wise isn’t automatically
hilarious. Just as Roger Ebert says,
throwing a fat guy in a movie doesn’t make the movie funny…the fat guy needs to
do something funny goddamn it! I’m
gonna need more than just a few sporadic chuckles in a memoir so dependent on
hilarity.

In Toby’s defense, he expressed a
few thoughtful insights. For instance, he gave a brief but scathing review on
“political correctness” within the American liberal education system based on
his experiences at Harvard. He complained that cultural relativism was pushed
to the extreme, forsaking the possibility of moral truths by making any/every
point of view viable and laudable. He opined that students merely resisted offending
anyone when they maintained that no one was “right”. In turn, this led to
diluted discourse. Additionally, he quoted Tocqueville, a French philosopher
who argued against the United States’ conception of democracy. He agreed with
Tocqueville that as a whole, Americans are subject to the “tyranny of the
majority”—not truly liberated because the mainstream rules (Young, 20). He went
on to condemn our version of meritocracy; we think that we are successful
because we earned it and we deserve it. We falsely convince ourselves that all
of us start on an even playing field, ignoring the fact that we have essential
resources that others lack. We revere a strong work ethic above all, snubbing
those below us because “they’re just not working hard enough”. Toby notes that
social mobility in Britain is more fluid and Brits who benefit from the
aristocratic system are more likely to recognize their class-advantages and
donate to the less-fortunate than Americans who assert that the poor remain
poor by sheer lack of willpower. He states, “America is a faux meritocracy in
which abhorrent levels of inequality are justified by an appeal to a principle
of social justice that, however sacred, has yet to be implemented. To use a
baseball analogy, America’s most successful citizens were born on third and
think they’ve hit a triple” (Young, 241). As you can see, British-American
comparisons run abound. In this case, I absolutely agree.

Lastly, he criticized the notion of
the Holy Zeitgeist. During his time at the magazine, he was surrounded by
people who blindly worshipped fashion fads—people who believed that “the next
big thing” was dictated by a divine, invisible hand.New York, as a hub of cultural renaissance,
was a kind of Mecca that Toby could not willfully get behind.

While these three redeeming
factors-- an argument against cultural relativism, a reconsideration of how
democracy intertwines with liberty, and a denunciation of a deified fashion
industry—are certainly thought provoking, they comprise only a very small
portion of the memoir. I would much rather hear more about those ideas and less
about how Anna Wintour wears sunglasses indoors. Overall, Toby is an honest
guy, eager to throw everyone he worked with under the bus (including himself),
but it doesn’t quite move past the realm of superficiality. As a result, I give
it 2 out of 5 camel humps. There are some tiny pellets of potential
there that don’t come to fruition, so don’t waste your time.

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Lyndsay West

About Me

I’m a 25 year old lover of reading and writing. I was born and raised in Dallas, Texas, and I graduated from the University of Virginia in 2013. Currently, I live in New York City making my writing mark on the world via freelance work. Other interests include religious studies, philosophy, psychology, dancing, and live music.

Follow my twitter: @humpdayhardback

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